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The other night I turned on TV and caught half an episode of the original Star Trek where Captain Kirk meets Abraham Lincoln. Seriously. Sometimes even our favorite science fiction and fantasy franchises can be quite silly. Check out this list of unintentionally hilarious lines from science fiction and fantasy. What are some favorites of yours?
Sometimes our favorite movies and TV shows feature some hideously ridiculous dialogue. Sometimes nonsensical and melodramatic speech is part of why bad movies are such a guilty pleasure. Here are the 10 awesomest lines of unintentionally funny dialogue from science fiction and fantasy movies and television.
The fact that most aliens from outer space in science fiction movies and TV shows have the same shape as humans can be explained rather simply: that’s the only way an actor can fit into the costume. But it doesn’t help us imagine the probability that any extraterrestrial life would not resemble humans at all. Kyle Munkittrick constructed a theory, adapted from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that reconciles this anomaly by explaining why distant planets have human-shaped intelligent beings, called the Hominid Panspermia Theory.
Intelligent life evolved in the universe – 0nce. The First Intelligent Species became spacefaring but, unlike the adventures depicted in most science fiction, they found an uninhabited universe. Non-intelligent species were too rudimentary or too far away to be detected. Thus, as both a memorial to themselves and to enliven the universe, the First Intelligent Species seeded the necessary DNA for the eventual evolution of intelligent life in the primordial oceans of every planet that could support life. The First Intelligent Species did not only design the DNA to evolve intelligently, but to parallel their own evolution. An application of the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” on the scale of life itself. Our corner of the universe thereby became the home of Vulcans, Romulans, Cardassians, Humans, Betazoids, and other hominid species which are all decedents of the First Intelligent Species. Therefore, in the eyes of the universe, the many hominid species are closely related despite their disparate home planets.
Of course, the theory itself is science fiction, but the mental exercise helps the scientist to enjoy science fiction, no matter how cheesy the alien design. As a bonus, the graphic at the article has twenty aliens you are invited to help identify. Link
Mama told me not to trust those Martians! The song is from The Imagined Village. The clips are from various space movies and TV shows that you’ll find listed at the YouTube page. -via Buzzfeed
May 25th is Towel Day {wiki} in tribute to Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote that a towel is “the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”
On Towel Day, all of Adams’ fans are encouraged to carry a towel around with them, or to at least know where their towel is, following the great tradition of hitchhiking, traveling, managing, and adventuring laid out in his work. Naturally, this got us to thinking about all the hoopy (really together guy) froods (really amazingly together guys) that we know in fiction that really know where their towels are. You know, the characters who you could drop off anywhere and anywhere in the space time continuum, and come back in an hour and they’d already be lounging in perfect confidence and opulence, nocking back something highly alcoholic. Any one who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Movie, comic, and science fiction fans will surely find something to argue over in this list at The Mary Sue. Link -Thanks, Susana Polo!
Ray guns have been featured in everything from War of The Worlds t Star Wars, yet it seems a hand held ray gun is still a thing of science fiction. Here however is a history of the imaginary device as it appears in different books and movies.
The ray gun is but one invention that, in the optimistic futurism of the early-to-mid 20th century, seemed to be just around the corner, like personal jet packs, food in pill form, and machines that launder your washing and hand it back to you neatly wrapped up in Celophane (thanks, Lost In Space).
While many sites are posting about wonderful, selfless mothers that make you feel inadequate on Mothers Day, here’s a list that will make you or your mom feel like a saint in comparison! Pop culture has moms that eat their young -sometimes literally. First on the list: Mom, from Futurama.
She has three sons, and she knows the father of one of them for certain. But she smacks them around and insults them on a fairly regular basis. Though they’re all pretty stupid and infatuated with her that they don’t seem to notice they’re being physically and emotionally abused. And ripped off — Mom owns 99.7 percent of MOMCORP while the other .3 percent is evenly distributed among the three of them. But like I said, they probably have no idea. Is it abuse if they don’t notice? If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Exactly. (Mom said that’s how it works.)
Link -Thanks, Susana!
From the it-must-be-real-cuz-I-saw-it-in-the-movies department, here’s the shocking (or not so shocking, depending on your level of faith in humanity) results from a recent survey of British adults, as conducted by Birmingham
Science City:
1. Over a fifth of adults incorrectly believe light sabres exist.
2. Nearly a quarter (24%) of people are wrong in their belief that humans can be teleported.
3. Nearly 50% of adults wrongly believe that memory-erasing technology exists.
4. More than 40% of people incorrectly believe that hover boards exist.
5. Nearly one fifth (18%) of adults have the incorrect view that they can see gravity.
Link – via AOL Weird News
Looking at this list, I realize that the seeds that spawned the cult of the geek were indeed planted in the movies of the ’80s, as opposed to the rise of the internet in the ’90s.
For those of you who grew up at least in part in the eighties, you know that it wasn’t all about Molly Ringwald and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Though not all cinematic masterpieces, there were a lot of really fun movies that glorified the geeks of the day. Here are a few you could pick up for nostalgia’s sake – or especially if you missed the eighties, make sure you’ve seen these if you haven’t!
It’s all there -science, space, robotics, computers, and of course, socially awkward teenagers. Link
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This chart posted at io9 exposes the many liberties filmmakers take with science in movies about space. The only two films to receive a clean bill are true stories from history. Link -via The High Definite
A recent meme is to mix up science fiction universes to provoke an indignant response from science fiction geeks. A quote from a movie, TV show, book, or video game will do, but make sure it’s mis-attributed and laid over a picture that has nothing to do with the quote or the attribution! See 32 examples at Geekosystem. Link
College Humor has a collection of science fiction stories done up as children’s books. I liked Goodnight Dune the best, but you really need to see Oh, The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Who. Link -via mental_floss
Props, costumes, and other artifacts from the TV series Stargate are up for auction September 25 and 26 in Seattle, Washington. If you can’t be there, you can bid on items via internet. Yes, it’s possible you could end up with your very own Stargate! But it won’t be cheap. Just the catalog for the event costs $45. Link -via Boing Boing
Update: You can download the catalog for free! -Thanks, MikeG!
Our pal Geekosystem has gone into a lot of trouble ranking the 10 coolest planets of the Sci-Fi world. Listed at number 4 is the Mogo, a sentient planet:
We have Alan Moore to thank for Mogo, the sentient planet and member of the Green Lantern Corp. Frequently referred to as "he" despite lacking a gender, Mogo is one of the most solitary of the Lanterns, since, should he try to visit another planet, the force of his gravity might tear it apart. Mogo has complete control over his surface and weather patterns, which he uses to create the illusion of the Green Lantern emblem in green foliage, and he gladly serves as a training and recreation planet for the Lantern Corp. He also guides the trajectory of owner-less Lantern rings to new recruits. Over the span of DC continuity he has been host to a few transient races, though has never produced sentient life of his own.
Mogo doesn’t like it when you compare him to a billiard ball.
Here’s the list. See if you agree with the top pick: Link
Quick: what do you know about the famous science fiction author Ray Bradbury? If you’re stuck with just Fahrenheit 451
Veronica Mittnacht of Flavorwire took nuggets from Sam Weller’s Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews
1. Many people know that Ray Bradbury wrote his most famous work, Fahrenheit 451 in just nine days on a rented typewriter in the basement of the UCLA library. However, what wasn’t known until recently is that in the process of writing the novel, he made a unique friend: Ernest Hemingway’s son. They rode the same bus every morning to the library and got to talking. Hemingway told the stranger that his favorite writers were “Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury,” and the two remained friends for decades.
5. In many ways, Bradbury was a writer of intuition. In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury was the first to predict the invention of flat-screen TVs, televised surveillance footage, ear-bud headphones, and ATMs — in the space of the nine days he spent writing the novel. However, it wasn’t until later that he realized how subtle his subconscious instincts really were: without knowing it, he’d named his four main characters after a paper company (Montag), a pencil company (Faber), an envelope company (Granger), and a now-gone office supply chain (Beatty).
6. Ray Bradbury never went to college. Instead, he went to the library all day, three times a week, until he got married at 27. To this day, he regularly organizes fundraisers for libraries, and refuses to touch e-reader devices like the Kindle.
Johnny Cat pointed out that Stephen King’s latest movie novel Under the Dome may cause you to recall the 2007 film The Simpsons, as both involve a city suddenly isolated under a glass dome.
Fans seem less convinced that the novel’s conceit – a town discovers that it is encased in a giant dome, put there by an unknown force – is so terrific. Many took to the internet to point out that a similar plot was the basis for The Simpsons Movie. King took to his website to respond that he had never seen the movie and that the similarity came as a complete surprise. Fans reacted with incredulity, pointing out that not only is King a pop- culture omnivore, but has played on stage with The Simpsons creator Matt Groening in his Rock Bottom Remainders band. King then gave a different account of the book’s origins, this time saying he started it in 1978 or thereabouts, and wrote a second, unpublished version called The Cannibals in 1985. In order to silence any accusations of plagiarism, he published the first 60 pages on his website (in the original IBM typescript to prove its age).
But the problem is not who had the idea first. King may argue that “stories can be no more alike than snowflakes” as “no two human imaginations are exactly alike”, but Stephen King novels and Simpsons movies are similar in that they are big pop-culture events aimed at roughly the same sort of audience – and with such events, the concept is as important as the execution. Also, both film and novel use their conceit to give dramatic focus to tales of the interconnected lives of a large cast of everyday small-town Americans. It doesn’t matter whether King has seen the film; his readers have, and this takes some of the shine off his novel.
If you’ve seen the movies and read the book, let us know what you think. Link -via The Litter Box
You know them, you love them, but you might not know the complete background stories of your favorite science fiction authors, actors, and producers. John Farrier looked deep and saw that many of them were actual heroes, serving their countries in time of war. You know about Kurt Vonnegut’s war experience, as he wrote about it in Slaughterhouse Five, but others never mentioned their military stints. Find out about five of them at NeatoGeek. Link
Rikishi Boy (1970) by Shigeru Komatsuzaki
Pink Tentacle has a fantastic collection of sci-fi illustrations by Shigeru Komatsuzaki (1915 – 2001), a prolific Japanese illustrator who drew futuristic images for magazines and model kit boxes. Don’t miss this one: Link – via metafilter
PS. If you like this, you’d love our sci-fi blog NeatoGeek
Towel Day is celebrated on the 25th of May every year to honor the memory and works of Douglas Adams {wiki}, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. From the book:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-tohand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
The simplest way to celebrate is to carry your towel with you, which some fans do everyday. The official site has other suggestions, and a schedule of Towel Day events from all over the world. And remember: Don’t Panic! Link
(Image credit: Flickr user SiRGt)
What of The Empire Strikes Back were a 3D movie from the 1950s? It would look somewhat like this. A list of the video sources can be seen at the YouTube link. -via The Daily What
Peruvian filmmaker Ricardo de Montreuil made the short film The Raven on a budget of only $5,000. It is based on a treatment for a potential film trilogy. I won’t give any details, just enjoy the effects! -via Geeks Are Sexy
Fard is an animated short directed by Luis Bricenco and David Alapont. It’s in French with no subtitles, but the plot is visual. The action really gets going about four minutes in. The style and effects make it quite memorable. Link -via Metafilter
In 1931, a schoolboy wrote a fan letter to his favorite author, Edgar Rice Burroughs. It said, in part:
I am a fourteen year old boy and am a low Junior in High School. Today at school our teacher was discussing “good literature.” I asked if Edgar Rice Burroughs was all right for a book report. I knew she’d say “no” (teachers always do) but I didn’t expect her to lecture to the class for the whole period about how terrible your books were!
The author of the Tarzan novels wrote back, in part:
My stories will do you no harm. If they have helped to inculcate in you a love of books, they have done you much good. No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.
Which explains why I bought the Twilight books for my youngest daughter. The 14-year-old boy who wrote the letter was Forrest J. Ackerman, {wiki} who grew up to coin the term “sci-fi”. Ackerman was a film producer, actor, and the editor of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, and made a name as the biggest science fiction fan ever. Read both letters in full at Letters of Note. Link
Cover designer Lauren Panepinto took a screecast while designing the jacket for an upcoming book by Gail Carriger. If you’ve ever wondered what goes into designing a book jacket, this video will give you a pretty good idea of the time and skill it takes!
– via orbitbooks
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by jimmdare.
Product is a graphic tale by Jon Phillips. The dystopian sci-fi plot can get a bit depressing if you think that will bother you. If not, you’ll be glad you stuck with it through to the end. Click the linked image to enlarge. Link -via Digg
We’ve had quite a few sci-fi movies grace our screens these past ten years, and Avatar will cap off a decade of the genre’s efforts this Friday. But which ones were good enough to make it on Sci-Fi Squad’s top ten list? Their staff narrowed the winners down to eleven, actually, with two very similar independent films occupying the same entry.
Jacob Hall writes about one of his picks: Minority Report.
The film is an engrossing look at a startlingly realistic future where psychics are used to predict murders and “Pre-Crime” units arrest would-be killers in advance. It is also a rousing, muscular action film in the vein of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the only film in recent memory to have a jet-pack chase. A jet-pack chase. It raises fascinating questions about choice and destiny and how even the best intentions can be abused and corrupted. It features oddness not seen from Spielberg since the ’80s, including a cackling Peter Stormare and Cruise pursuing his own rogue eyeball down a hallway.
They did leave some very good titles off their alphabetical list. I’d have gone ahead and put Avatar on there for how it looks alone.
Link. (Photo: Dreamworks Entertainment)
Cinematical has a list of ideas for making movies based on classic 20th century TV shows. A couple of these I’d never seen, but I definitely remember tuning in to see Martin Landau and company fight to survive each week on Moonbase Alpha (Space:1999, pictured).
The list includes Earth 2, The Six Million Dollar Man, and others with video clips of their opening sequences. Here’s author Kevin Kelley’s take on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century:
We just want to see Buck back on the big screen, where he has never really been (the original TV pilot was edited into a theatrical release). Toss some up and coming young star with good looks and a strong chin in this, and revamp everything. Just keep the cool laser pistols in it, and for god’s sake don’t let Buck disco.
An impressive fan-made intro to that show… Link to Cinematical.
Image: Rainbow HandicraftCharlie Jane Anders of io9 has assembled a gallery of sixteen velvet paintings with science fiction themes, such as Yoda/Elvis, Kim Jong-Il as a Sleestak, and the great Wesley Crusher.
Would you like for Admiral Ackbar to decorate your home?
Blogger Kenny Pearce is developing a bibliography of works of science fiction that are particularly noteworthy for expressing a philosophical worldview or premise. He presents several categories, such as Mind, Solipsism, and Sex and Gender. Some of the stories that he lists are available online, like Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question” — a confrontation with entropy.
Pearce asks readers for suggestions. What would you add to the list?
Link | The Last Question | Image: NIH
For a science fiction series, Star Trek had a lot of references to religion. Gene Roddenberry once said he rejected all religions, yet one or another of the Ten Commandments showed up in quite a few episodes. Beliefnet takes a look at some of those episodes.
In “The Apple” from the original “Star Trek” series, Captain James Kirk and his crew encounter an idyllic world whose ageless inhabitants feed a computer named Vaal.
It seems like a dandy setup to Mr. Spock, but Dr. McCoy argues that it can’t be healthy to have all your needs met by a “hunk of tin” (perhaps shortly after polishing off a meal created by the Enterprise’s replicator). Eventually, the Enterprise is forced to zap Vaal with its phasers, sending the binary being to an ignoble, smoky end.
The natives are seriously bummed, but Kirk cheers them up by telling them they can now work and struggle and get sick and die just like everyone else. Yay!
Corridors in science fiction movies may seem like a strange subject for an article, but that’s just because you’ve never thought about them. Martin Anderson notices them, rates them, and brings them to you for consideration. You’ll be surprised at how many there are, and the many features they have in common. Link -via b3ta
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